She shrieked and bit at my forearm. I tried to break free, but her teeth were clamped against the flesh. 'Bethesda,' I pleaded, 'let me go!'
She broke away and spun around, her back to the wall. She reached up to wipe the taste of blood from her mouth. Somehow she had managed to hold the lamp aloft and burning without loosing a drop of oil.
'Why did you do that?' she screamed. She beat her fist against the wall behind her. There was a kind of madness in her eyes. By the: lamplight I saw the bruises on her face and throat. The neck of her gown had been badly torn.
'Bethesda, are you hurt? Are you bleeding?'
She closed her eyes and took a breath. 'Only a little hurt.' She held up her lamp and looked into the room, then made a face so wretched that I thought some new menace had entered the house. But when I followed her gaze to the floor I saw only the broken and blood-matted corpse of her beloved Bast.
I tried to hold her, but Bethesda would not be held. She pulled away with a shiver and hurriedly went from room to room, using the flame from her lamp to light every lamp and candle. When the whole house was alight and she had satisfied herself that no intruders lurked in the darker comers, she bolted the door and went about the house again, closing all the windows.
I watched her in silence. In the wavering light I saw the shambles that had been made of the house: furniture overturned, hangings ripped from the walls, objects smashed and broken. I lowered my eyes, numb from looking at chaos, and found myself studying the trail of blood on the floor, the mangled body of Bast, the writing on the wall. I stepped closer. The letters were of different sizes, many of them misshapen and inverted, but the spelling was correct. It had obviously been made by someone unused to writing, perhaps a complete illiterate reproducing the symbols from a copy. It hurt my eyes to read it:
BE SILENT OR DIE. LET ROMAN JUSTICE WORK IT’S WILL.
Bethesda walked past me, cutting a wide swathe around the corpse of the cat and averting her eyes from the wall. 'You must be quite hungry,' she said. Her voice was strangely calm and matter-of-fact.
'Very hungry,' I admitted. I followed her to the back of the house, into the pantry.
She lifted the lid from a pot and pulled out a whole fish, flipping it onto the table where it gave off a strong smell in the warm, still air. Beside it lay a handful of fresh herbs, an onion, some grape leaves. 'You see,' Bethesda said, 'I had just come back from the market.'
‘When did they come? How many of them?'
Two men.' She reached for a knife and brought it down on the fish, chopping the head off with a single, clean stroke. 'They came twice. First they came late this morning. I did as you've always said, I kept the door locked and bolted and talked to them through the httle window. I told them you were gone and probably would not be back until very late. They wouldn't say who they were. They said they would come back.'
I watched as she cleaned the fish, using her fingernails and the sharp tip of the knife. Her hands were extraordinarily nimble.
'Later I went to the market. I was able to get the fish very cheap. The day was so hot, the market was dusty, the man was afraid it would spoil before he could sell it. Fresh fish from the river. I finished my shopping and came up the hill. The door was closed, the latch was in place. I checked for that, as you always say to.'
She began to chop the herbs, bringing the blade down hard and fast. I thought of the old shopkeeper's wife.
'But the day was so Very hot, and so still. No wind from the garden at all. I could barely stay awake. I left the door open. Only for a little while, I thought, but I guess I forgot. I was so sleepy I went to my room to lie down. I don't know if I slept or not, but after a while I heard them in the vestibule. Somehow I knew it was the same men. I heard them talking low; then there was a loud noise, like a table overturned. They started shouting, calling your name, yelling obscenities. I hid in my room. I could hear them tramping through the house, turning over furniture, throwing things against the walls. They came into my room. You always imagine you can hide if you have to, but of course they found me right away.'
'And then what?' My heart raced in my chest.
'Not what you think.' She reached up to wipe a tear from her eye. 'The onion,' she said. I saw the bruise that circled her wrist like a bracelet, left by a strong man's grip.
'But they hurt you.'
'They pushed me. They hit me a few times. One of them held me from the back. They made me watch.' She stared down at the table. Her voice became grim. 'I had been squabbling with Bast all day. She was crazy from the smell of the fish. One of them found her in the kitchen and brought her to the vestibule. She bit him and scratched his face. He threw her against the wall. Then he pulled out a knife.' She looked up from her work. 'They wrote something. With the blood. They said it was for you, and that you shouldn't forget it. What does it say? Is it a curse?' 'No. A threat. It doesn't make sense.'
'It has to do with the young slave who came yesterday, doesn't it? The new client, the parricide?'
'Perhaps, though I can't see how. Cicero sent for me only yesterday. It wasn't until today that I started stirring up trouble — yet they must already have been on their way here, even before I spoke with the shopkeeper and his wife…. How did you escape from them?'
'The same way I got away from you just now. With my teeth. The big one holding me was quite a coward. He squealed like a pig.'
'What did they look like?'
She shrugged. 'Bodyguards, gladiators. Fighters. Big men. Ugly.'
'And one of them had a limp.' I spoke the words as a certainty, but Bethesda shook her head.
'No. No limp. I watched them both walk away the first time.'
'You're sure. No limp?'
'The one who held me I didn't really see. But the one who wrote was very big, and blond, a giant. His face was bleeding from where Bast had scratched him. I hope he carries a scar.' She flipped the fish back into the pot, sprinkled it with the herbs and covered it all with grape leaves. She poured in water from an urn, put the pot over the fire, and stooped to tend the flame. I noticed that her hands had begun to shake.
'Men like that,' she said, 'would not be satisfied with killing a cat, do you think?'
'No. I think they might not.'
She nodded. 'The door was still open. I knew I had to get away while the blond giant was still busy smearing letters on the wall, so I bit the man holding me as hard as I could, here.' She indicated the thickest part of her forearm. 'I slipped from his arms and ran out the door. They followed me. But they stopped suddenly as they were passing between the neighbours' walls. I could hear them behind me, making disgusted noises, snorting like pigs.'
'That would be when they stepped in the pile of excrement.'
‘Yes. Imagine men who could smear their hands in cat's blood, turned into squeamish matrons from a bit of shit on their sandals? Romans!' The word came out of her mouth like venom. Only a native Alexandrian can pronounce the name of the world's capital with such withering disgust.
'I lost myself in the street, until I thought they must be gone. But when I came back to the foot of the pathway I was afraid to come up. I went into the tavern across the street instead. I know a woman who cooks there, from seeing her in the market. She let me hide in one of the empty rooms upstairs, until I saw you coming home. She lent me a lamp. I called out from below, to warn you before you reached the house, but you didn't hear.' She gazed into the fire. 'Will they come back?'